SHAMBHALA SUN JANUARY 2007 117
epiphany. Fifty-seventh between Fifth and
Sixth Avenues is neither famous nor strik-
ing; by Manhattan standards it is a drab
block. It is ordinary. Yet it was here that
Joan Didion, several years ago, witnessed
what she calls an apprehension of death. In
Magical Thinking she describes “an effect of
light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves
falling (but from what? were there even
trees on West 57th St.?), a shower of gold,
spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright.”
She believes what she saw is death. “It
was so beautiful,” she says now, “and so
inexplicable in some way. I assumed that
I was having a stroke, but I wasn’t.” A few
years before, she had had an earlier vision
of death: “an island that was all ice, and
glittering like a crystal. They were both
very beautiful images.”
These apparitions of death did not make
her fearful. On the contrary, they provided
some measure of assurance. There’s a con-
nection, Didion says, between two com-
mon problems: the way we deny death and
the way we do not fully appreciate life. In-
stead of working to pass through the fear
found within ourselves and perpetuated
by our culture, we try to ignore it, hop-
ing the paradox will go away. “If we didn’t
deny death, we would know how brief our
moment is alive,” she says. “To some extent
it would be difficult to function if we re-
ally appreciated how brief that moment is.
Which is why people don’t do it.”
Only a small minority strive to live ful-
ly aware of impermanence. “If you could
reach an acceptance of that and not be un-
done by it, well, that’s where you should
be, I guess.”
Seeking clarification, I offer this: we all
view life as solid and permanent, and we
look at it that way to deny death. But the
way to open up and fully embrace life is by
accepting that life is transient.
“Yes,” she says. “I think that’s absolutely
right.” It fits with her geological truth.
“What I believe in is the permanence of
the impermanence.”
Most of the time these days Didion is
home, and alone. Her apartment is the
best place to focus on what she must do
now. “Immediately after John died people
were always around, and it was a good
thing,” she says. “Then I began to feel very
strongly the need to have time alone, just
to find order—in my own mind. So that’s
what I’m doing now.”
The events of the past few years have,
inevitably, affected Didion’s view of her
own death. “It’s made it much more pres-
ent as a concept. I mean, everything that’s
happened in the past few years was ter-
rible, but was also, in some odd way, quite
liberating. You know that song, ‘Freedom’s
just another word for nothing left to
lose’—it’s liberating in that sense. You’ve
seen the worst and you’ve lived through it.
So it’s not going to get worse. It’s liberating
to people who have a lot of anxiety and are
apprehensive, which I have always been.
“I’m not so apprehensive anymore, and
not so anxious.”
Sometimes at home she reaches for
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the book she
first turned to for comfort almost forty
years ago. Only now she is reading it not
just to feel good. She is pondering its wis-
dom, especially what it says about letting
go. After decades of missing its meaning,
she is opening up to it. “I think now I get
the lesson,” she says. Catching herself and
chuckling, she adds, “I don’t get all of it.”
Getting the lesson, Didion says, is a
work in progress. And applying it to life is
tricky, too. “I have yet to successfully ap-
ply it. I seem to be in a morass of things
undone. I don’t seem to be able to let go
enough to either decide not to do things,
ortodothemandmoveon.Partofitis
that I’m still grieving, and part of it is that
during the past couple of years I got quite
seriously behind. If you don’t do some-
thing every day, you tend to become afraid
to do it, and to some extent I don’t feel
quite as capable as I did.
“But that’s not a lack of control; it’s just
a lack of practice. Now I’m putting energy
into trying to get back in charge, without
being in control. Getting back in charge
just means cleaning out my life, simplify-
ing. It doesn’t necessarily mean trying to
control it.”
Letting go, she says, is necessary through-
out life. “You have to. You have to because
everything changes. It’s the hardest thing to
learn. It’s the hardest thing to do.” ♦
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KARMA TRIYANA
DHARMACHAKRA
Tibetan Buddhist Teaching
and Meditation Center
His Eminence
Garchen
Rinpoche
JAN26-27
2007
The Four Thoughts
and
Milarepa Stories
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&
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each day.
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